osbornes

Click on a picture to launch a slideshow of all the pictures in the gallery.

Ted Osborne (grandfather) c.1912, at the Rugby Boxing Club in Walmer Road. The club was founded by old boys of Harrow and Rugby Public Schools to provide social activities ad discipline for the slum dwellers of Notting Dale. 'Digger' Stanley, a local gypsy who had started boxing in fairground booths and became Bantamweight champion of England in 1909 also fought there and was a neigbour of the Osbornes. Another lively local was Alf Mancini who fought for the British welterweight title in 1928. The Mancini family had an ice cream parlour in Bramley Road and one of Alf's brothers modelled for the sculptor Augustus John.

Bobby Osborne (father) being arrested by the Military Police for absconding from National Service and escorted to ‘The Glass House’, a colloquial term for The Military Corrective Centre in Colchester c1950’s.

Georgie Osborne (uncle) ‘walking on his knees'. He had a pet monkey called 'Wanker' and a parrot that he taught to swear. He was a scrap metal dealer and also worked as a waiter on cruise ships to Australia.

Albert Osborne (great uncle) wearing a flower hawking suit with slits in the trousers to display stems c1930’s, with his wife and sister Alice (left), who smoked a pipe.

Nellie Osborne (grandmother), who was a Romany gypsy, photographed outside her shop in Portland Road on Coronation Day 1937, with Bobby and Billy, two of her twelve children. She received a letter of congratulations from the King of Spain for having a large family and taking in orphans from the Spanish Civil War.

Osborne junk shop at 103 Clarendon Road, Notting Hill Gate, 1957. Ted (4th from left) with 9 of his surviving sons. They had stables for horses and carts in Latimer road and stalls in Portobello Market.

Leslie ‘Spikey’ Osborne (uncle) served 21 years in Brixton. Was a friend of Buster Edwards and was ‘questioned’ after the Great Train Robbery c1960’s. Rumoured to have burgled the Lord Mayor of London’s house in the 1940’s and suspected of making rings and jewellery from the gold chain.

'Nelson' the one eyed horse.

Tommy ‘Popeye’ Osborne (uncle) who could smoke and drink with both hands.

Bob Osborne and Lynda Davies (Ist wife) at Canteloube in the Lot Valley, 1989, home at the time of the novelist Mario Reading, who was later to write the bestselling Antichrist Trilogy.

Bob and Sophie Osborne

I visited the eccentric East End photographer Harry Diamond in his Hackney flat shortly before he died in 2009. Famously painted by Lucien Freuf (most notably 'Interior at Paddington' 1951), he had many artists including Freud, Bacon and Auerbach in front of his lens over the decades. Luckily he took a couple of smudges of me and were probably the last photos he ever took.